NEW YORK & PARIS--(EON: Enhanced Online News)--AdaCore
today announced the launch of its 2nd annual “Make with Ada”
programming competition, a contest that aims to help the embedded
software community improve the quality of their code by encouraging the
use of the Ada and SPARK programming languages. The competition runs
from May 15 to September 15, 2017, and offers over €8000 in total
prizes. Participants can register for the competition at www.makewithada.org.

“Ada and SPARK are most known for their
track record in large-scale long-lived systems, but you can use these
languages and AdaCore’s tools for software that has to run in the most
resource-limited embedded environments including bare metal targets.”

Competition Rules

The competition is open to individuals and to teams with up to four
members. The goal is to design and implement an embedded software
project where Ada and/or SPARK are the principal language technologies.
Entrants will need to demonstrate that their system meets its
requirements and has been developed using sound software engineering
practices. The submission deadline is September 15, 2017, and the award
winners will be announced in October 2017.

Prizes and Judging Criteria

Cash prizes will be awarded to the projects that best meet the overall
criteria of software dependability, openness, collaborativeness and
inventiveness.

Top Prize: €5000 ($5500)

Second Prize: €2000 ($2200)

Third Prize: €1000 ($1100)

A Student-only Prize will also be awarded to the best-ranking Student
Finalist: one Printrbot Portable 3D Printer. Entrants must provide a
student ID when registering to qualify for this prize, as defined in the
competition terms and conditions at http://makewithada.org/terms.
A project submitted by a student is eligible for both the Student-Only
Prize and the cash prizes.

“Judging last year’s Make with Ada competition showed me how
developers new to Ada and SPARK could quickly come up to speed with
these languages and produce some ingenious embedded applications,” said
competition judge William Wong. “I look forward to seeing the range of
projects that are submitted this year; I’m sure that the combination of
software engineering talent, safe / secure languages and top-notch
development tools will produce some impressive results.”

“This is an exciting opportunity for developers to try the Ada or SPARK
technologies and demonstrate their imagination and programming skills,”
said Fabien Chouteau, AdaCore software engineer and author of the Make
with Ada blog post series. “Ada and SPARK are most known for their
track record in large-scale long-lived systems, but you can use these
languages and AdaCore’s tools for software that has to run in the most
resource-limited embedded environments including bare metal targets.”

The “Make with Ada” competition is part of an overall AdaCore initiative
to foster the growth of Ada and SPARK for developing embedded systems
and more generally for developing “software that matters”. Other
elements of this initiative are the free on-line training available at
AdaCore U (u.adacore.com),
and the various resources for free software developers and
students/hobbyists at the GitHub repository (github.com/AdaCore)
and the libre site (libre.adacore.com).

Further information about Ada and SPARK, along with links to free
resource pages and instructions on how to get started by downloading the
GNAT GPL edition for Bare Board ARM, are available at http://makewithada.org/getting-started.

About Ada and SPARK

Ada is a modern, internationally standardized programming language with
a long and successful track record in the development of
high-reliability embedded systems. Its strong typing and compile-time
checking help catch errors early, when they are easiest and least
expensive to correct. The most recent version of the Ada standard, Ada
2012, supports contract-based programming (pre- and postconditions for
subprograms), which in effect embeds the software’s low-level
requirements as checkable assertions in the source code. In critical
systems where testing alone might not provide sufficient confidence, the
SPARK subset of Ada supports mathematics-based assurance that relevant
program properties are met (for example, the absence of run-time errors
such as buffer overflow). SPARK can be introduced incrementally into a
project, and contracts can be verified either statically (by the SPARK
proof engine) or dynamically (with run-time checks).

About AdaCore

Founded in 1994, AdaCore supplies software development and verification
tools for mission-critical, safety-critical, and security-critical
systems. Four flagship products highlight the company’s offerings:

The GNAT
Pro development environment for Ada, a complete toolset for
designing, implementing, and managing applications that demand high
reliability and maintainability,

The CodePeeradvanced static analysis tool, an automatic Ada code reviewer and
validator that can detect and eliminate errors both during development
and retrospectively on existing software,

The SPARK
Pro verification environment, a toolset based on formal
methods and oriented towards high-assurance systems, and

The QGen
model-based development tool, a qualifiable and customizable code
generator and verifier for Simulink® and Stateflow®
models, intended for safety-critical control systems.

Over the years customers have used AdaCore products to field and
maintain a wide range of critical applications in domains such as
railway systems, space systems, commercial avionics, military systems,
air traffic management/control, medical devices, and financial services.
AdaCore has an extensive and growing world-wide customer base; see www.adacore.com/customers/
for further information.

AdaCore products are open source and come with expert on-line support
provided by the developers themselves. The company has North American
headquarters in New York and European headquarters in Paris. www.adacore.com

ANNAPOLIS, Md.--(EON: Enhanced Online News)--AdaCore announces the publication of a free booklet, co-authored by Thales, that explains how to exploit SPARK/Ada technology to achieve high levels of ... more »